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Saturday, April 2, 2016

Here's last night's Munk Debate - this stream will be available for a limited time, so if you haven't seen it yet (I was there and it was fun and the most heated of the many wonderful Munk Debates so far), it's well worth watching. What I found particularly interesting was not only what was said, but what was not said. I may have more comments on this in the coming week:

Louise Arbour argues that Australia’s offshore processing of asylum seekers is wrong and that we should have ‘orderly’ onshore processing. The Australian experience is that once asylum seekers are onshore, it usually ends all reasonable prospect of deporting anyone found not to be a genuine refugee but an economic migrant or indeed a criminal seeking to relocate their criminal activities. There are countries like Iran which refuses to take back their citizens if deported. The big problem, however, is that it is now standard practice for non-refugees to destroy their passports and identity documents. They are told to do this by people-smugglers. They can’t be deported if we can’t prove that they are citizens of any particular country. So the choice becomes either permanent ‘inhumane’ detention (imagine the protests) or eventually they get released into the community.